Continued from the previous quintet of installments: a look at Rajesh Setty's Blogging Starter Checklist, with a particular eye toward applying its advice to blogging on a Drupal site.
http://www.squidoo.com/blogstarter
This time, a change of pace: I'll look back at all the past Checklist suggestions I undertook, implemented, or otherwise subjected myself to, and report on results.
Yes, results! That's what makes the world go round. Results put the spin in the globe, the worm in the tequila, the... uh... the drupe in Drupal...
Ahh, I don't even know what I'm saying. Let me start with this:
First, a shameless request. Installments in this series on blogging have turned in a split verdict on visitor reads: half have nearly or well over 400 reads, while the other half sputter at just over 100 reads. Yet I don't think any are uninformative. You may think otherwise, of course; I have to expect that some initial visitors were intrigued by the topic, but said "ho-hum" to my posts and trundled off.
Please let me ask the following, Good Reader:
1) Is this series boring or not of much use? If so, please say so – and suggest improvements, if you have an idea – in the comments.
2) Is this series interesting or useful? If so, please tell others, via a blog of your own, via the "Email this page" link at bottom, or by whatever means work for you. I have a few more installments queued up in this series, and can start any number of new series on blogging (or web dev in general) using Drupal, but will only move ahead if I'm sure someone's interested!
Links for the series so far are:
Drupal and the Blogging Starter Checklist, Part I
Drupal and the Blogging Starter Checklist, Part 2
Drupal and the Blogging Starter Checklist, Part 3
Drupal and the Blogging Starter Checklist, Part 4
Drupal and the Blogging Starter Checklist, Part 5
Drupal and the Blogging Starter Checklist, Part 6
I hope the low readership numbers for some of the installments are just a fluke. Your (brutally frank) comments, and/or your efforts to let people know of the series if you think it's of interest, will be a big help in determining whether and how to continue.
On to the main event. Of the many Blogging Starter Checklist suggestions I've taken up in this series, here are those with some follow-up of note:
Naturally, I've had search from the start – and since that post, even found a fix for my broken Google web search. See
Fixed: Google web search block. (And go ahead and try a Google web search using the upper right block. Go ahead, I dare you.)
Haven't heard from anyone who's used the Contact Link and Nodeauthor information modules.
Yep, I've been placing those on all my new content. Actually, there's an annoyance involved with that: the Creative Commons Lite module requires that I choose a license for all newly-created content! I don't care for that at all; why can't I leave a particular piece of content with no license if I desire? Other than that point, I'm happy with what the module does.
Update on this: Okay, I can now go to the FeedBurner web site and see how many RSS subscribers there are to this site...
Ooh, that's not pretty. Lots of work to do.
Is there any other purpose to this FeedBurner? Anyone?
In the post, all I claimed was ignorance of what Technorati is and what it's supposed to do.
I can now go to Technorati, search for Drupalace.com, and see that I have an Authority of 4 (is that good? I doubt it!), and a Rank of 1,372,336 (hmm, no doubt about whether that's good!).
But now what? What does Technorati do for me as a blogger? Ah, services without instructions! Love 'em!
Any words from the Technorati cognoscenti would be appreciated.
Everything worked as promised, but I'm removing the Feedster block I had set up at left. No particular need here for another news feed.
About six weeks after submitting my RSS feed to Findory, a search for Drupalace does turn up my posts, but only if I search under the "Web" tab (and not "News" or "Blogs"). Meh.
I never did submit my site at TTLB, not readily seeing any way to do so. As follow-up, I'll only note that I did receive an email from the site, telling users that the site is alive and making improvements.
A couple weeks after submitting my site, Blogarama emailed to say they'd added Drupalace.com to the directory. Great! But as I mused in the post, will that actually bring people? A search on Blogarama for "Drupal" reveals Drupalace among a few other sites (though oddly, a search for "Drupalace" turns up nothing).
MyBlogLog quickly switched me from Pro to the free version after three days. I'm keeping the widget up while I learn more about what good it does.
In response to my report of problems, I received a post comment from a member of the CoComment team. They say they've fixed bugs, so if you've got an interest in the service, give it another look.
Now here's one that really interests me, especially after receiving a comment to the post from a member of the HitTail team. So I went and signed up for the free version.
I didn't find the sign-up process particularly smooth, especially as I found myself being asked for payment information when I only wanted to first test-drive the free service. Closing the page on the payment info request seemed to leave me registered for the free service. So that worked, if in some unclear way.
My bigger problem is this: I can't get the service to work. I placed the supplied code into this site, yet any attempt to look at my Search Hits only gets me the message "There are no New Search Hits", along with the suggestion that perhaps I don't have code enabled in every page. Yet I've confirmed that the code is in my pages, exactly as HitTail supplied it. (You can confirm the existence of the code yourself: pick any page on this site, view the source code, and do a search for "HitTail" within the source code.)
I've followed the other troubleshooting hints, such as making sure I supplied the correct domain name. (Then there's this suggestion: "Close all browsers, open a new browser window and search on mysite.com." What does that mean? "Search on mysite.com"? Is that a very broken way of saying "Go to Google and perform a search for your own domain name"?)
Until I get this working, I have no report on HitTail. : (
Those are the past items for which I have some follow-up comments. Next time, it's on to more blogging tips, and any Drupally connections to them.